On not writing

I haven’t been writing much. I haven’t been having sex much. All my energy has been going into some combination of work, writing elsewhere, unhelpful political reading and podcast-listening, and vaguely helpful escapist reading (The Plot Against America, haunting, prescient).

My cock has been neglected. I have been neglecting my cock. I haven’t been masturbating, haven’t been having much sex.

There are all sorts of reasons – physical pain, political pain, the pressures of life. I was talking the other night with a friend, wondering about how much of it is, just, well, age.

I don’t know. I don’t, honestly, care.

What I care about is this: my cock has that aching hungry feeling right now. It’s non-specific. And it’s not, exactly, horny. It’s more like… hungry to be horny.

Because reasons, I found myself reading, recently, about the phenomenon of desire. I didn’t like any of the definitions I came across. Here’s Merriam Webster’s first definition of the verb form:

1: to long or hope for : exhibit or feel desire for desire successknew that men still desired her.

And here’s their first definition of the noun form (recursively present in the verb definition):

The second definition of the noun form is “longing, craving.” This starts to feel more helpful.

Desire isn’t a positive thing, an active thing. “Want,” it feels to me, is a richer word, meaning both “to long for” and “to lack.” It has, embedded within, the impossibility of its fulfillment: if I want something, I can’t have it; if I have something, I don’t want it.

“Desire” and “want” feature lack as an essential element. All those “keep it new” advice columns for married couples gesture toward this reality: for “want” to be powerful, there must be lack.

I think the Stones got it ever-so-slightly wrong: you can’t ever get what you want.